


The Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress) Op

by MurphysScribe



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Gen, Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress), Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 08:31:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1219585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MurphysScribe/pseuds/MurphysScribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Coulson, Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov have been running an undercover op in New York, trying to take down some organized crime, and retrieve some alien tech, in a joint op with the FBI.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to twelve_pastels, because this is her fault (and because she is an excellent beta)
> 
> Timeline note: This takes place before the Avengers movie, when Agent Coulson was just Clint and Natasha's handler.
> 
> Songfic note: This is a songfic, tied to the song "Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)" by The Hollies.  
> If you want to listen to it with lyrics, here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qKOv3VBJcc  
> I will also post lyrics as Chapter 2
> 
> Ownership note: Marvel owns the characters. The Hollies own the song. Natasha owns the little black dress.  
> All mentions of Irish and Russian mob activities are intended as tropes, not as cultural commentary or libel.
> 
> Lyrics critique: Who sings about a woman and specifies that she's "Just a 5'9" beautiful tall?" Weirdly specific, and just weird!

It was Saturday night, he was downtown, on a joint op with the FBI. They were working to take down major players in the Irish mob, the Russian mob, and to confiscate what they were reasonably sure was alien technology (likely the only thing that could bring the two factions together). The Russians’ base of operations was a former speakeasy on Hudson, once owned by the legendary Big Bill Dwyer. (This had been a sore point between the Russians and the Irish for decades. There were still a few bullets lodged in the walls from prior altercations.) Coulson sat at the bar, a bottle that appeared to be very expensive Russian vodka at his elbow.

Further down the bar was a crowd of men from Woodside, men in sharp suits with wary smiles. The row of empty and nearly empty Bushmill’s bottles and highball glasses ranged across the bar told the story of their very long evening. Every so often, Coulson heard Clint’s voice, raspy with a South Boston accent. They’d been undercover for more than a month, and from the sound of the sheer number of toasts to “our good lad Fitzgerald,” Clint’s cover identity was finally being welcomed fully into the fold.

Coulson refilled his glass from the bottle (it was water) and lifted it to his lips. “Are you in position,” he murmured, covering the words with the motion.

 _“Da,”_ said Natasha _“I am almost finished getting ready_ ,” she said, in Russian. He couldn’t see her- she was in the bar’s curtained off “backstage” area. _“I have nearly everything we need.”_

Years of training kept Coulson from showing his surprise at what he heard. She had it all? The op was starting to fall into place, finally. He loosened the collar of his shirt. In his guise as a small-time Ukrainian arms dealer, Coulson had been wearing cheap tacky suits for a month, sitting in this stuffy bar to see and be seen- he’d be glad to get out of here for good. This place got brutally hot when it got crowded. He reached for his phone, and was about to dial the DA’s office to coordinate.

A spotlight came up on the stage in the back. A blue curtain parted as a song’s opening chords began.

A woman in a black dress took the stage, her head bowed as she waited for the audience to settle. Red waves of hair fell away from her face as she began to sing. The entire room fell to a hush at the sound of her voice- but Coulson’s silence wasn’t one of appreciation. His heart hammered, senses on high alert. She’d moved the plan into fast-forward without checking with him or Clint- their backup wasn’t in position yet. But, Natasha crooned into the microphone, as cool as a 1940’s chanteuse. The melody was vaguely familiar, though she sang in Russian. Coulson used the mirror behind the bar to check on Clint’s crowd, to see where they were on the spectrum between drunken revelry and cultural pride in the bar’s Irish history. They were still toasting, some were beginning to sway to the song.  They were just on the cusp of drunken appreciation of the bar’s Irish heritage getting them too annoyed at the Russian singer. Coulson caught his agent’s eye, nodded briefly. Coulson quirked a corner of his mouth up in an approving grin. He saw Clint motion to pour another round.

Coulson had to try twice to catch the bartender’s attention. The young man had been watching Natasha sing, raptly. He leaned closer so Charlie the bartender could hear him through Natasha and the music. “I would like,” Coulson said in his thick Ukrainian accent, “to send this fine young woman a drink, with my compliments. She is beautiful, yes?”

The bartender nodded emphatically, a faint blush staining his cheeks. Coulson suppressed a wry smile. The kid barely looked old enough to drink alcohol, let alone serve it. Even if Natasha was the Russian lounge singer she was pretending to be, he wouldn’t be able to handle her. And with the new timeline, they’d all be extracted by the end of the night, so he’d never see her again. Poor, heartbroken Charlie.

No time to call the DA or get backup into position. Coulson palmed his phone under the bar and sent a few hurried, encoded messages. Hopefully that would be enough.

Natasha had two more songs to sing- Russian translations of 1940’s standards that had two thirds of the bar’s occupants swaying and raising their glasses, and the crowd around Clint starting to look perplexed.  Now, if Coulson could just get his backup here while the emotions were running high, but before the alien device started to pick up on them. Clint poured another round for his cronies.

Yuri, one of the men they had been watching particularly closely for ties to the alien tech, leaned over to Coulson with a sloppy grin that sharpened as he swooped in and grabbed for Coulson’s bottle, to fill his empty glass. Natasha wasn’t singing. She needed to be singing still. They needed backup. The crowd had moved enough to leave Coulson cut off from clear sightlines to both of his assets. “Nyet!” Coulson said, grabbing Yuri’s empty glass, then explained in Russian. “ _This is not good enough for my friend. The idiots here have shamed us by pouring cheap vodka into an expensive bottle. I think it is not even Russian,”_ he cautioned.

Yuri recoiled in dismay, his emotions exaggerated even beyond drunken outrage. Coulson checked what he could see of the others in the room- looked like tempers were starting to rise- the device was here, and it had kicked on. He signaled Charlie and pointed imperiously to the bottle on the shelf that was the twin of the one by his side, with a stern look that had Charlie scrambling to fulfill his request for the unopened bottle of top shelf vodka. OK, small crisis dealt with, where was his backup and why wasn’t Natasha singing?

He caught sight of her heading to the table with… what was _Fury_ doing here? Towering over the rest of the room in his long leather coat. “Sitrep, now!” Coulson muttered. He used the mirror behind the bar to catch their eyes without turning.

“Spike in the device readings, but we can’t get a fix on the location,” Fury replied.

“Thought you had everything?” Coulson caught Natasha’s gaze.

“I said nearly everything. Still working the last piece out of Ivanov, but this will do it.”  She leaned close to Fury at their table, as if whispering this last to him instead of into Coulson’s comm. Then she unfolded herself from the table and made her way in her slinky dress back to the stage. The music started up again- but it wasn’t the song they’d agreed on. Coulson recognized the melody. So did Clint’s cronies who set up a cheer for the familiar Irish air. What was Natasha trying to do, get them blown? Get them killed?

The Irishmen from Queens stopped cheering abruptly as Natasha began to sing “Danny Boy,” in Russian. This was a mess, a bad mess.

Coulson eased himself off his stool and edged towards the stage. Through the bar windows, he could see the red and blue lights of police cars approaching- NYPD would be out of their depth once they had the device, but better than nothing, as backup went.

There was a nasty murmured undercurrent beginning below the music: tense glances between Clint’s crowd and the rest of the bar.

Coulson didn’t see who threw the first punch. He ducked out of the way of a falling body, and got into position near Natasha, who was still singing. He spotted the undercover FBI agent in Clint’s crowd, nodded once, and tried to spot the other two agents he knew had to be somewhere. The way this night was going, they weren’t even in the room. Natasha’s target, Ivanov, was close by. Coulson tried to move through the press of bodies into a better position.

The NYPD burst in, flashing badges, and adding to the chaos. Finally, Coulson saw one of their other FBI agents- he’d brief the NYPD.  People were jumping over tables, crowding away from the police officers and getting in one another’s way.

“I was wrong. I know where it is. It’s Charlie. Go!” Natasha hissed over the comm.

But Coulson was stuck near Ivanov and Natasha.

“Got it, boss,” said Clint, even before Coulson had looked at him. The crowd that had Natasha and Coulson pinned down was working against the bartender, too. Clint vaulted over the bar and cornered the young man, who looked like he was cowering, scrabbling and sliding down on unsteady legs like a cornered animal.

Coulson grabbed Natasha’s hand and tried to push through the fighting crowd. Fury was a few yards away, working his way towards them. He grabbed Coulson’s hand to help him and Natasha find a way through the crowd.

“Gun!” Clint said in clipped tones, and Fury, Natasha and Coulson whirled to look where he was.

Charlie the whimpering bartender had shed his timid air and had a .38 trained on Clint, who had his hands up. “Easy, easy” they heard Clint say. Most of the rest of the crowd was oblivious, fighting their own fights, and hadn’t seen it yet. Fury plunged back through the crowd to the bar, Coulson and Natasha at his side.

And then Natasha wasn’t- she’d found a path back to the bar faster than they had, and was moving into Charlie’s sight lines with her eyes wide and her hands raised. “You do not have to do this, Charles. You are far better than this, more worthy.”

Coulson didn’t have an angle to draw his weapon, but he got close enough to the bar to grab one of the empty whiskey bottles, bracing himself against the shoves of people fighting behind him. Someone charged Coulson, and he bashed his attacker with the bottle, reducing it to a jagged neck.

Natasha held Charlie’s gaze. “I can help you. You have great power, I know... if you come with me—perhaps we could use it…. Together?”

The gun shook in Charlie’s hand. “You are very brave, Charles. I want to help you,” Natasha murmured. She was edging closer. “Will you let me hold the gun, please?”

But Charlie wrapped his shaking fingers around the trigger, steadied, and….

BANG!

Bottles and glasses behind the bar exploded in a cascade. The shot had come from behind Coulson.  Clint, Charlie and Natasha had all dropped out of Coulson’s sightline. He leaned over the bar, anxiously, with Fury close by.

The bullet had hit Charlie in the shoulder and he was down, Natasha holding him steady while Clint searched him for the device

 “The thing’s silver and kind of egg-shaped, right?” Clint said, his voice sounding strange and muffled in the gunshot’s aftermath. Satisfied his agents were ok, Coulson turned to see who had made the shot. It was one of the cops (the inter-agency paperwork on this one was going to keep him busy for weeks.)

 “Thank you,” said Coulson.

The policewoman nodded. “We’re calling for an ambulance.”

All around them, the FBI and the police were taking statements from those who hadn’t fled. And, as if on cue, the S.H.I.E.L.D. team Coulson had tried to get earlier arrived. Coulson sighed.

He looked over the bar at Natasha. “Danny Boy? Really?” he murmured.

She gave him a cool smile. “I got it all….”

 “Yes,” Coulson said, wearily. “You got it all.”

He reached down the bar for a bottle of Bushmills that had survived the fight, and poured a generous measure into the nearest glass. “You got it all.”


	2. Lyrics to Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics of "Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)" by the Hollies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, how is "Just a 5'9" beautiful tall" even a song lyric????

"Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)"

Saturday night I was downtown  
Working for the FBI  
Sittin' in a nest of bad men  
Whiskey bottles piling high

Bootlegging boozer on the west side  
Full of people who are doing wrong  
Just about to call up the DA man  
When I heard this woman sing a song

A pair of 45's made me open my eyes  
My temperature started to rise  
She was a long cool woman in a black dress  
Just-a 5'9, beautiful, tall  
With just one look I was a bad mess  
'Cause that long cool woman had it all

[Instrumental Interlude]

I saw her heading to the table  
Like a tall walking big black cat  
When Charlie said I hope that you're able boy  
'Cause I'm telling you she knows where it's at  
Then suddenly we heard the sirens  
And everybody started to run  
A-jumping out of doors and tables  
When I heard somebody shootin' a gun  
Well the DA was pumping my left hand

And a-she was a-holding my right  
Well I told her don't get scared  
'Cause you're gonna be spared  
I've gotta be forgivin' if I wanna spend my living  
With a long cool woman in a black dress  
Just a 5'9 beautiful tall  
Yeah, with just one look I was a bad mess  
'Cause that long cool woman had it all  
Had it all  
Had it all


End file.
